In my Daily Dose video series, I explore the topics that chief customer officers must grapple with on a daily basis. Join me as I discuss what I’ve learned over the course of my 35-year career, so that you can more effectively do the work that needs to be done.

How we’re greeted as customers tells us a lot about the treatment we’re about to receive. Whether it’s placing a call to a company, checking into a hotel, walking into a retailer, visiting the doctor—that first moment of contact cements it. And as you’re standing there, or on the line waiting, or waiting for that tweet to come through, you get that little catch in your throat waiting to be acknowledged.

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Beth, for example, feels fortunate, because under her employer healthcare plan, she can go to an urgent care clinic in town along with her family members, for no additional copay. As a teacher on limited income, this puts her mind at ease. But every time she checks in at the front desk, filling out forms is the front desk person’s priority. When the employees at the front desk say hello, their heads are tilted toward that computer screen.

Be Sure to Recognize and Welcome Customers

What Beth really wants is what we all want: to be a priority. She wants those employees to acknowledge her with respect and ask her how she’s doing, and how they can help her. What we all yearn for is to be recognized and welcomed, and to have our priorities understood and acted upon.

How you answer the phone and greet customers gives them important clues about what the rest of their experience with you will be like. And it’s all too easy to slip into an ultra-efficient routine that inadvertently focuses on internal processes rather than the human right in front of you, or right over the line, or the tweet, or the chat box.

Would you invite your mom to an event at your home, then give her a number and ask her to take a seat? Of course not. You’d welcome her in, ask her how she was doing, and make her comfortable. You’d make sure she knew you acknowledged her importance. So honor the human right in front of you. “Make-mom-proud” companies act on people’s desires to be welcomed and acknowledged.

Hyatt Hotels, who we mentioned earlier, focused their human-centered redesign on the moment of recognition we all yearn for in a hotel check-in experience. CEO Mark Hoplamazian, for example, said that this work began when he personally observed Hyatt’s check-in experience from the perspective of a human customer rather than from the hotel chain’s perspective.

As a result, Hyatt spent two years developing a system that redirects the front desk clerk’s initial focus with a customer from keying in the reservation to a greeting and a welcome. And this redesign has led to an increased focus on who they hire, and how they engage people at that front counter. Now, empathy and human connection, rather than the sound of those clicking keys, are the focus, the goal, and the hallmarks of a Hyatt Hotel welcome.

Rethink Your “Hello”

The great opportunity here is to rethink and redesign your “hello” with a welcome, with eye contact when possible, and by calling customers by their name. And of course, this all sounds intuitive. We should warmly and personally naturally greet our customers. But the truth of the matter is that frequently, this is the exception rather than the rule.

ContactPoint Client Research has found that on average, employees ask or welcome customers by name only 21% of the time.

Small Gestures Make Real Impact

Be the company that always honors the person first. Before you do anything else, acknowledge the customer, the human, reaching out to you. Care genuinely. Know or ask for or acknowledge his or her name. This small gesture paves the way for real relationships that go beyond transactions.

They set the “make-mom-proud” companies apart, and these interactions, these gestures, don’t cost a thing. Humanity trumps paperwork.

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“Thank you for watching this video. After it’s played, you will receive a survey and I really need you to give me a ten. Anything less is not passing and I won’t get paid.”

Does that sound familiar to you? It might if you’ve ever been in the back of a ride-share app or you’ve engaged with a customer service agent. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, instantaneous surveys are on the rise. Whether it’s in-app, on-screen, via text or email, your customers are getting more surveys than ever before.

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When Surveys Tell a Skewed Story

Survey score begging: Would you do that to your mother? Yet around the world, people are being forced to beg for those survey scores. This is because the scores, not improving the customers’ life, has become the endgame. And this has removed the appreciation and the grace that should accompany less than perfect feedback.

And—drumroll please—”please give me top scores” has earned a ranking as the fourth most annoying question ever uttered in DialogDirect’s Customer Rage Survey.

Shift the Mindset

A less than perfect score is an opportunity to improve, not a failure in performance. Leaders, when you shift your attitude and how you pay people to embrace the gift of feedback, you will become a different kind of company, and your customers—and your mom—will be forever grateful that the begging has ceased.

Here’s a comic that summarizes this “Would You Do That To Your Mother?” moment; click on it and right-click (Ctrl-click on Mac) the image to download it for your team. Let’s make this a movement!

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]]>http://customerthink.com/earn-positive-survey-results-dont-beg-for-survey-scores/feed/0The State of Customer Experience: 3 Important Stats You Need to Knowhttp://customerthink.com/the-state-of-customer-experience-3-important-stats-you-need-to-know/
http://customerthink.com/the-state-of-customer-experience-3-important-stats-you-need-to-know/#respondFri, 30 Aug 2019 20:38:44 +0000https://www.customerbliss.com/?p=5809http://customerthink.com/the-state-of-customer-experience-3-important-stats-you-need-to-know/feed/0Are You Stepping Up to the Challenge? Prepare for Disruptions and Adapt to Consumer Behaviorshttp://customerthink.com/are-you-stepping-up-to-the-challenge-prepare-for-disruptions-and-adapt-to-consumer-behaviors/
http://customerthink.com/are-you-stepping-up-to-the-challenge-prepare-for-disruptions-and-adapt-to-consumer-behaviors/#respondMon, 26 Aug 2019 20:02:52 +0000https://www.customerbliss.com/?p=5792

As a CX practitioner, I continue to see how technology ushers in disruptions across retail and other B2C service industries, but I want you to remember that customer behavior is the actual impetus for these disruptions.

I thought this concept would be worth briefly discussing (and revisiting), especially as I came across NJ Goldston’s, 5 Strategies on How to Stay Ahead of Customer-Driven Disruption on Forbes. In her article, NJ quotes author, Suman Sarkar, who said that “disruption is, in fact, driven by changing customers needs — and that only those companies that truly understand their customers can succeed.” I and my colleagues have our own case studies that support this notion.

Customer Behaviors Are Disrupting Your Business

In fact, Thales Teixeira, a former Lumry Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, recently spoke with meabout this topic on my podcast. Thales shares that market disruption happens mostly during the process of buying products and services.Consumers want options and convenience, and as providers, you have to step up to the challenge to provide this for them.

These specific needs are why Walmart has instituted 2-day shipping on qualified orders to compete with Amazon Prime, it’s why Starbucks has an app for loyalty reward points and offers the ability to place an order for your drink before you step foot into the store. In my conversation with Thales, he points out the ways companies can focus on increasing value for their customers. As a CX leader, you need to figure out which of your company’s behaviors are value-creating or value-eroding. You’ll want to start by fully understanding the steps involved in your customers’ journey.

Determine How to Accommodate Your Customers’ Needs

Additionally, as a CX leader, you need to have a good understanding of who your customers are. In NJ’s Forbes article, she shares another notion from Sarkar, that “millennials and Generation Z approach the world and the marketplace in very different ways — influenced by peer reviews, driven by the desire for personalized products and service, and unwilling to delay gratification.” Your audiences may have different approaches but expect the same end result. You will have to think through how to create seamless experiences that benefit your range of audiences.

In my conversation with Thales, he reminds us that “that whatever you do, you start with the customer first because they are making the decision that will disrupt markets or not.” I definitely encourage you tolisten to the podcastand read the show notes to learn strategies to help you adapt to this behavior that will continue to impact your business for years to come.

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A drink of water from a bottle in my hotel room just cost me about 42 cents. Most big box stores sell a 24-pack of bottles like these for about eight bucks or 33 cents a bottle? Would you do that to your mother? To your customer? I know that companies get addicted to the spreadsheet of incoming revenue streams that can be had from nickel and diming customers, but they only think of the upshot of that revenue, not of the customers who walked and told everybody that they know that this is a company that takes advantage.

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Does your company employ opportunistic charges and fees?

According to priceonomics.com, water in hotel room mini bars have an average markup of 100% compared to grocery store prices or a markup of about 300% based on what they actually pay!

When you think of only the short term gain and not the long-term loss of your customer’s business and their good word, your opportunity for growth depends heavily on customer acquisition and spending money to get in new customers because the ones you brought in last month have already left.

Maybe that’s why the seven bucks for that water and all those other “nickel and dime” items stay in our business practices despite customer protests.

Choose fair pricing instead of opportunistic fees

Instead, why not try a habit that will keep more customers and get them talking about you and your fearless sharing? Why not just charge the customer what it costs you or just not charge at all?

In my latest book, Would You Do That To Your Mother?, I share a case study in the chapter “Take the High Road,” about Virgin Hotels, named #1 U.S. hotel by Conde Nast Reader’s Choice Awards. They walked away from price gouging at the mini bar, so you’ll never pay more for that Snickers bar than what you’d pay at the corner market.

Here’s a comic that summarizes this “Would You Do That To Your Mother?” moment:

See more comics from the book, as well as quotes from my videos, interviews, and blog posts on my Instagram page.

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Have you just become a C-Suite leader for your B2B organization’s customer experience? Or maybe you’re looking to elevate and become a CX leader — if so, you’ll find this episode valuable. We’re revisiting snippets of conversations with previous guests this summer, and in this episode, we’ll hear from Yellowfin’s CCO, Lee Roquet and former CCO of Rigor, Francis Cordon.

Both leaders share tactics that they implemented in the first few months of their role at these SaaS companies. I encourage you to listen to the episode, especially Francis’s segment, where he talks about the concept of FAAS (Fast As A Service).

Bucket Your Work Into Different Categories

Upon starting his role at Yellowfin, a company that offers business intelligence reporting and analytics software, Lee already had a plan to assess the work that he needed to do. He shares that he created a process for himself to assess situations by bucketing things into the following categories: product, people, and systems and process.

Analyze the product: Lee knew they had a good product, but he also needed a better understanding of customer issues and what could be improved. So he took the product training courses that customers initially go through, in order to understand the experience from their POV.

People: How are customers trained? How are they helped, and how do they feel at the end of the process? Lee spent time gathering feedback from customers to understand their pain points with the product and experience as a whole, so he could work with his team to make improvements.

Systems and process: Lee looked at some of the standard requests that came in from the support teams. He wanted a better understanding of what was done for the development of the product roadmap and how customer issues were handled. After analyzing these internal processes, Lee developed a system to improve the ticketing process for employees handling customer issues.

Lee also shares that ultimately, this was a plan that he knew would take at least a year to start penetrating the organization, with multiple years needed for full effect. He says that even at the two-year mark, he was still the major force championing this project. So, don’t get discouraged when it comes to this work and looking for success.

As former CCO of Rigor, a company that provides performance monitoring and optimization software, Francis Cordon was extremely passionate about his work to transform the company’s customer experience. He was once a customer utilizing a SaaS product service and was able to understand the importance of truly having a valuable relationship with a vendor. Given this experience, he made it his mission to empower his employees to create strong connections and provide valuable services to customers.

When he stepped into his role, Francis did the following:

Integrate his team: Francis understood that customer success doesn’t just come from post-sales. He worked with pre and post-sales teams, and customer/tech support to get them on the same page in terms of fostering customer success.

Communicate the importance of providing value: When customers renew with you and upgrade services, you’re developing a successful relationship. Francis had his employees think through the ways they could be of more assistance to customers; they need to offer services and support that would enable the customer to truly sell the product internally to their boss and team.

Establish KPIs: What are your current conversion rates? Francis wanted to develop something that was measurable that he could hold his team accountable for. Also, it’s important to know what your customer’s KPIs are, so you can help them reach their goals and showcase the value of your product.

Francis shares that once his employees became more empathetic with their customers, there was a shift in relationships that proved to be extremely beneficial for the company.

Does this scenario sound familiar: I’ve had breakfast, lunch and a snack and the cable guy is still not here. I got a call from him about an hour ago that he’s, “On his way.” No clue what that means.

Is it about your customer’s needs? Or about your company’s?

Would you do that to your mother? Would you tell her you wanted to visit her, then give her a four hour window, during which time you may or you may not show up?

That four hour window was created for the company, not for the customer, and certainly not for your mom. It says, “We put our needs ahead of yours.”

[Read more about this topic in this blog post, in which I share a case study that illustrates this point.]

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Lost wages + productivity = irate customers

In a survey conducted by CNN Money, 58% of Americans said they waited for in home appointments for the cable guy and other people for an average of four and a half hours. Many lost wages waiting and some even had to use a sick day or a vacation day!

I know we’re in August and the Back to School advertisements are making the rounds, but summer isn’t over yet! So if you’re heading on vacation soon or relaxing as business slows down a bit, here are a few book suggestions for you to uplevel your own CX skills and that of your team. The following books should be in your arsenal for customer experience transformation.

I hope you pick up a copy or two from the list below and head back to work with a new strategy for getting things done!

In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath ask you to think about the positive moments and experiences you’ve had in your life. They explain how these experiences are created because of four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. Their insights help us understand why we tend to remember the best and the worst moments of an experience. Chip and Dan share anecdotes and research that help us piece together ways we can create delightful but meaningful experiences that elevate customers.

Horst Schulze, Founder, Chairman & CEO of the Capella Hotel Group, and Co-founder & Former COO of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. knows a thing or two about creating memorable experiences and providing stellar customer service. In this book, Horst shares distinct principles that have helped him amass global success over his fifty-year career. Horst knows how to lead himself and others into greatness and has grown the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. into a multi-billion dollar brand. Learn how you can apply Horst’s principles to your business.

Jay Baer, Founder of marketing consultancy, Convince & Convert, and author of 6 best-selling books, has co-authored this book with Daniel Lemin, shedding light on why and how customers talk about brands. There are more than 30 case studies on different brands and the tactics they employ that results in word of mouth recommendations from one customer to another (Doubletree Hotels and the warm cookie upon arrival, Cheesecake factory’s extensive menu, and more). Pick up the book and read about their 4-5-6 learning system that goes into creating a talk trigger.

Author, Matthew Dixon is the executive director of the Sales & Service Practice of CEB and also contributes to the Harvard Business Review. In this book, Matthew and his co-authors break down myths about sales, customer experience and customer loyalty. They share research-based facts to help you create plans of action with measurable results. You’ll find tools and templates that have already been tested with CEB in this book to help you improve service, reduce expenses, and decrease churn.

Author, keynote speaker, and consultant, Chip R. Bell provides a great resource with nine key concepts to help you deliver customer service and experience that’s truly memorable. Like the other CX experts, Chip knows that there’s more to creating a great experience than just providing good service. In this book, Chip offers great takeaways with a focus on grace and giving that will really have you take another look at how you interact with your customers and employees.

As we continue to revisit conversations with CX leaders who were previously on the show, today we’re going to explore strategies implemented by two CX leaders at global corporations: Scott Allison, CCO at DHL Supply Chain and Jon Herstein, CCO at Box.

Both leaders share great tactics and strategies that they implemented when asked the question, “how did you first assess the work that needed to be done?” Considering they both work at established, global corporations with hundreds (and thousands) of employees, it’s interesting to see the scope of the work they chose to tackle.

Use Employee and Customer Feedback to Solidify Your Organization’s Values and Messaging

When Scott Allison of DHL first stepped into his CCO role, he approached the work by looking at the four aspects of customer experience below:

Internal Stakeholder management.Talk to your employees – not only those who report directly to you but to those who don’t as well. He searched for common threads in the responses to determine areas of improvement for him to focus on.

Understand customer perspectives. It was important for Scott to know what the customers thought was going well. In addition to focusing on things that needed to get fixed, Scott wanted to know how they could improve things that were already going well and make them better.

Improve brand messaging. Scott realized that DHL is a great business but didn’t believe that the company communicated it well enough. He wanted to ensure that DHL got its messaging right. Scott wanted to develop the business values and use them as a guide for creating a mission/purpose for employees, something that communicated the value of the business rather than what they actually do.

Develop a customer-based strategy.With the desire to create a sense of purpose for employees and to improve brand messaging, Scott merged these two goals with a plan to focus on the company’s social media. They began training salespeople on social media in order to communicate brand success stories, to be more accessible to customers, to get feedback, and to further communicate DHL’s values.

Create a Framework to Attack Specific Areas of Improvement

When Jon Herstein first assessed the work that needed to be done in his role as a CCO, he developed a framework of six pillars to address some of the areas that needed improvement:

Focus on customer experience.Thinking through how are customers engaged and who is engaging them? Jon’s focus was to consider the personality of those who are hired (smile behind the resume) – ensuring that they have a service-oriented mindset. Jon wants employees to be empowered to fix a customer’s problem first then ask for permission later.

Leverage the voice of the customer. Jon wanted to figure out how to bring the perspective of customers back into the business to influence the way they build products, deliver services, and develop company strategies. It was important that he used customer insights to create meaningful work.

Be customer-focused (centricity). It was important to Jon that everyone in the company thinks about customers, even those who don’t interact with them. He wanted to develop a strategy that engaged employees to always think about the customer and ways to help them succeed.

Develop customer relationships. Jon knew that in order to be successful with customer centricity, customer relationships need to be nurtured. He formed an advisory board with this focus in mind.

Foster customer advocacy. Do you have a loyal fan base or community? If so, engage and reward them. Jon and his team built an army of advocates called, Box Stars. These Stars advocate on behalf of Box and have a mutually-beneficial relationship with the brand.

Cultivate thought leadership. Don’t be afraid to publicly share industry and organizational insights. Similar to Scott Allison and his desire to increase the visibility of DHL as an industry leader, Jon believes in the notion of publicly sharing more information about the company and some of the things they do.

As many of you may know, figuring out how to prioritize the work that you need to do with a role that holds such a large responsibility can seem overwhelming at first. Take the time to find your support system and break down big challenges into bite-sized portions to make it more manageable. Remember, don’t try to boil the ocean!

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There are a few industries that have a hard time acknowledging women, even when they ask the question. If a man and woman are present in retail, the woman may ask the question, but the man gets answered. Many of these industries have something to do with cars, planes, and boats.

But I’m here to tell you, women ask great questions, and often are the ones paying the bills and making the majority of buying decisions. Don’t answer us, at your peril.

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Check Your Bias at the Door

This is simply about respect. In any retail setting, someone who walks in your door can’t be sized-up by their sex, or what they wear, or whom they walk in with. I don’t think you would do that to your mother, so please, don’t do it to anyone, no matter who they are, or where they walk in from.

When you judge your customer, you lessen your humanity. So check your bias at the door. In retail, it is your humanness, your ability to connect and help that customer, that is the backbone of relationships and the backbone of business growth.

Here’s a comic that summarizes this “Would you do that to your mother?” moment:

For more on this topic, read this blog post in which I reflect upon the incidents last year at Starbucks and the bias that caused them.

What do you do within your own organization to account for unconscious and implicit bias? Leave a comment below to join the conversation.

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]]>http://customerthink.com/customer-respect-are-you-treating-women-with-respect/feed/0Why You Must Take the Monkey Off Your Customer’s Backhttp://customerthink.com/why-you-must-take-the-monkey-off-your-customers-back/
http://customerthink.com/why-you-must-take-the-monkey-off-your-customers-back/#respondWed, 24 Jul 2019 22:47:33 +0000https://www.customerbliss.com/?p=5747

In my Daily Dose video series, I explore the topics that chief customer officers must grapple with on a daily basis. Join me as I discuss what I’ve learned over the course of my 35-year career, so that you can more effectively do the work that needs to be done.

Sometimes in our lives as customers when we need help our own fortitude and ability to fend for ourselves determines the outcome. The extra mile customer with the gusto to call and call, search, act as a private eye, and put the pieces together and make copies and send files and return receipts gets the worm. Companies put the monkey on customer’s backs and the result is service exhaustion. We’re glad for the outcome received, but we don’t know if we have it in us to do it again.

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This occurs as customer request for support or information or assistance are met with a set of actions—or monkeys—that the customer must take or wait for or persist in checking up on. And the customer who can’t keep calling back or searching for answers is just as worn out as the extra mile customer.

Recognize the Consequences of the Monkey on Your Customer’s Back

Would you make your mom do extra work that you could have done for her? End service exhaustion.

The Make-Mom-Proud companies think about all of the steps, and the people, and the processes that it takes to get certain things done, and they resist layering work on customers. They work to remove the monkeys off customers’ backs.

Monkeying Around with Healthcare

Healthcare is one industry that delivers a lot of those monkeys. We are often left to our own devices to ensure that all of our healthcare records, for example, travel with us as we move to different healthcare providers. Mayo Clinic calls this the burden of care. And because many record keeping systems are not yet connected, we are still burdened with carrying x-ray films and test results, and filling out numerous forms ourselves to get them transferred from one physician’s office to the next.

And for those who have numerous medications to manage, the maze is even more complex. Patients have to then connect the dots to ensure that medications prescribed from one physician to another don’t cause adverse reactions.

One Make-Mom-Proud action to support the elderly most prone to this complexity is called the Pharmacy Home Project. This service, run by Community Care of North Carolina, guides elderly patients to help them coordinate all of their medications to prevent those adverse reactions. They actually travel home with patients, examine what’s in their medicine cabinet, and help them navigate the complicated maze of managing multiple medications prescribed by separate physicians.

And while we might expect monkeys in complex industries such as healthcare, it’s always a bit startling when they’re layered on us when we least expect it, when the solution we thought should have been so simple. Monkeys pop up in every industry.

End the Monkey Business

The Make-Mom-Proud companies know that the more monkeys or the more work they put on customers’ backs, the more customers will talk about the experience and how much pain the company put them through. And this is not because of the joy, but because of the experience—or you might say the monkey business.

As you think of that story, think about customer experiences with you. What extra work have you layered on your customers? Are there any monkeys that remain? And have you taken any off lately?

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This summer, I’m taking a bit of a break to prepare exciting new content for you, and in the meantime, I’m replaying a compilation of some snippets of conversations from past episodes. I know how much you all love when we get straight to the facts and tactics, so I think you’ll really appreciate the tips that come from CX leaders when they answer the question, “how did you assess the work that needs to be done?”

In today’s episode, we take a look at how Lucy Norris, Executive Vice President, Chief Customer Success Officer at Genesys and Daniel Coullet, Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Experience at PTC, handled the first year in their role. Both CX leaders represent tech companies but share advice that can be relevant to CX leaders in other industries.

Define and Develop Expectations

When Lucy first had to assess the work that needs to be done at Genesys, she did the following:

Be Physically Present

Lucy spent almost a year traveling, listening to salespeople, customers, partners, and going to conferences. She needed to understand the space she was in, and what both partners and customers thought about their experience with Genesys.

Develop a Business Plan

While things were slow as she first stepped into this role, Lucy took some time with her fresh perspective to develop a business plan centered around growing the maintenance business. This meant focusing on selling long-term maintenance contracts to customers while continuing to drive recurring revenue. It took her 5 months to develop the plan and begin rolling it out; she presented it in three phases:

What’s your hill? What are you looking to climb? What is at the top?

What is the strategy to climb the hill?

What is the execution?

Understand Current Customer Satisfaction

In tech, maintenance and support are extremely important. After some research, Lucy realized that the experience was not yielding happiness for the customers and decided to spend time figuring out how could she solve this problem. She also wanted to design the organization in a way that would help achieve more positive outcomes.

Define Customer Experience and Success

Additionally, Lucy spent time with her team defining customer experience and customer success. According to Lucy, at Genesys, customer success and customer experience are related but they’re not synonymous. She views customer experience as the journey along the way while customer success is the outcome.

Understand How Your Employees and Clients Feel About The Company

When Daniel Coullet stepped into his role as Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Experience at PTC, he realized one of the first things he needed to do was to actually understand what customer experience meant to PTC.

Understand How Your Employees View Their Work

What does the work being done mean to your employees? Daniel wanted to understand how employees viewed their work and the definition of the customer. Did it go beyond revenue? That was important to know.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

He also spent time clarifying terms and expectations for folks within the company to ensure everyone was one the same page. Similar to Lucy Norris, Daniel shares that it was important for them to define customer success. With a focus on customer success, Daniel and his team started meeting with his teams internally to understand the various points of view and contributions so they could start mapping the customer journey.

Listen to Your Customers’ Direct Feedback

Daniel needed to know directly from customers how they felt about their Genesys experience. He had some customers share their experience via video, and it was extremely eye-opening. Daniel reminds us that even your best customers have some suggestions for improvement and can give you specific insights regarding how certain behaviors impact the business.

As a patient, we want health care to put us back together again when we’re just not right, to give us peace, to be cared for, with our dignity intact. Well, the traditional hospital gown is just not cutting it.

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Is it designed for the company or the customer?

The hospital gown was originally designed to make it easy for health care providers to do what they needed to do, but this design clearly did not take the human wearing it into consideration, or the family or friends who suffered along with the lack of patient dignity. The existing hospital gown can impact a patient’s health. Patients suffer from vulnerability, which may impede getting better and that gown contributes to vulnerability.

However, a redesigned gown is proving to improve the entire patient experience. Dale Milford, a patient at Detroit based Henry Ford Health System, wore a newly designed gown for his liver transplant and he said, “The new gown was emblematic of an attitude that was conveyed to me at the hospital, that they cared about me as a whole human being, not just the part they were operating on.”

Download the #MakeMomProud Quiz

Audit your company with 32 questions that measure how beloved of a company you are, and discover whether you are earning admirable growth based on behaviors defined in Jeanne Bliss' new book, Would You Do That To Your Mother.

Often design processes and the things we make customers do are built because of what we want to get from them and what we need to get done. When you begin with what customers need instead of what you require, you will gain customers who love you, for understanding their needs and translating it into how you run your business and honor them.

Here’s a comic that summarizes this would you do that your moment. Let’s make this a movement.

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Ever been looked at sideways at a car repair shop? You know what I mean. You’re explaining a problem to the car repair guy or your plumber and an issue you’re having repeatedly, in this one instant, just won’t repeat. And when all you want is understanding and solutions, you get that look: you get humored, and sometimes, not served.

Demonstrate that You Take Customers Seriously

Auto dealers actually have a name for this. It’s called failure to duplicate. What about, instead, failure to empathize or take the customer seriously? In fact, this is one of the most cited reasons for customers to walk away from service companies and its people.

How to Reverse Customers’ Fear

The best way to reverse this fear is to show empathy, caring, and that ever-elusive transparency. These behaviors can increase your bottom line.

Beloved companies only hire people with that ability to care.

A Guide to Hiring People That Care

Would you ever tell your mom you don’t care?Today’s technology and resources have allowed consumers to engage with a company at a deeper level which has made how you hire and who you hire a top priority for business growth.

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]]>http://customerthink.com/avoid-the-failure-to-empathize-take-the-customer-seriously/feed/04 Steps to Assessing the CX Work That Needs to Be Done at a Young Companyhttp://customerthink.com/4-steps-to-assessing-the-cx-work-that-needs-to-be-done-at-a-young-company/
http://customerthink.com/4-steps-to-assessing-the-cx-work-that-needs-to-be-done-at-a-young-company/#respondMon, 01 Jul 2019 20:59:11 +0000https://www.customerbliss.com/?p=5728

As a CCO at a startup, how do you assess the work that needs to be done to begin the CX transformation? In today’s episode, we’re revisiting conversations with two CCOs who have implemented CX programs from the ground up: Chelsie Rae Lee of SnackNation and Allison Pickens of Gainsight.

Both women became CCOs of their companies during a time where no formal CX work had been instituted. Chelsie Rae joined SnackNation,a subscription service that delivers snacks to homes and offices, the company was small enough, which allowed her to frame her role and work to be done. In addition to holding the position as CCO, Allison Pickens is also Gainsight’s COO, and spent much of her first year defining her role, along with others’ and uniting her C-suite team to move the CX agenda forward. Gainsight is a SaaS company focused on customer success.

1. Clarify Role and Department Responsibilities

“That cross-functional work is something I’ve come to really enjoy, and get to do even more of it in my current role,” says Allison about one of her main responsibilities as CCO. Allison shares that she used this strength to focus on the benefits of creating cross-functional trust and cooperation. Within the first few months, she focused on defining roles and charters for others within the organization.

Allison mentions that some peoples’ roles weren’t fully defined, so she took on this work and defined the charters for every function. Additionally, she included the metrics that each function was responsible for. With this clarity, people knew what they should be doing when they get to work in the morning. The charters also included dependencies that they have on other functions. For example, if CSMs have expectations from the professional services team, those would be documented.

2. Create a 90-Day Plan

At SnackNation, Chelsie Rae thought about what she wanted the customer experience to look like at the end of 90 days. She shares that she mapped the experience and journey but really focused on customer churn. Since SnackNation is a subscription service, it was beneficial for her to understand when a customer may be ready to leave or why they canceled the service.

Chelsie shares that a large portion of her work during this time was related to data collection. She was missing data to help her tell the larger story. What made the customer tick? Why did they originally book with SnackNation? As she collected data, she also so she created a dashboard with the organization’s current numbers, where the numbers should be at the end of 90 days and where they should be by the end of the year.

3. Create a Hiring plan

At SnackNation, Chelsie shares that one of the CX strategies was also focused around employee experience and hiring. She had a vision for the team that she needed in order to drive the work forward. Chelsea created a hiring strategy that specified the type of traits that a candidate needed to possess.

Teamwork: need to be a team player and have an “it takes a village” mentality.

Company culture fit: can you get the job done? Do you work well with others? Using role play to understand how well the candidate takes feedback and self-assess.

Seek perpetual growth: need to have a desire to continuously grow and evolve.

Emotional IQ: how well can you bounce back and keep a positive attitude?

4. Unite your team around KPIs

Allison shares that at Gainsight, in order to have others in the company view customer experience as a business function that creates results, she had to incorporate performance metrics that could be reported on. She wanted to ensure that for any given function, each team would have metrics to help determine how their work was making an impact. When speaking about the various metrics at board meetings, it was easier to see how things were progressing over each quarter, which gave the CX work more credibility.

In this week’s Daily Dose video, I share an excerpt from a keynote I presented recently that focuses on the lessons of my most recent book,Would You Do That To Your Mother.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the video below.

What we know is: when we make it hard to do business with us, it costs a lot of money. You’ve probably seen the Siegel + Gale study, which says we’re leaving a collective $86 billion on the table when we don’t take care of customers’ lives. That’s a staggering figure.

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Honor Customers’ Time

One of the things that’s most important about building what I call a “respect delivery machine” is: honoring customers’ time.

Why do dry cleaners close at 5:00? We build our time and our operations based on convenience for us, the business.

Let me know if this sounds familiar: “I’ve had breakfast, lunch, and a snack, and the cable guy is still not here. I got a call from him about an hour ago that he’s on his way. No clue what that means.”

Let’s talk about Amazon Prime, which just about all of us have used at one point or another. Amazon Prime has two key metrics. Unlike many of our dashboards which have 3-point type, so we can cram more and more into our dashboards, they simply have two metrics that their customers care about—number 1—Do you have what I want and need? And—number 2—will you get it to me when I need it?

When we make customers’ time our priority, the frantic texting and the dialing and the calling and the tweeting doesn’t start. Their shoulders relax.

Your customers will remember you for the service you deliver, not the effort it takes to get it from you. So do you honor customers’ time and their clock?

[For more on this topic, click here to watch a previous episode of “Daily Dose…of Reality.”]

Get to Know Your Customers

Would you make your mom keep reintroducing herself to you? Of course you wouldn’t. But around the world, in every interaction we have as customers, we have to keep telling companies who we are, who we talked to last, why we’re so important to them, our value. Can you relate?

That’s why I’m so enamored with Stitch Fix and the story of what they’ve done to build “you know me” as their growth engine. Think of them as Netflix for clothes.

Their services suggests outfits for their customers; they come up with a box of five things to send you. And to start, they take an interest in getting to know you and your life.

You fill out a form. It’s interesting; the form is not about clothes, but how you live your life.

They ask you to send in your Pinterest pins. So now they’re starting to build a dossier.

They apply AI, so they’re now starting to understand by groups of customers who are similar to you. What are some things that you might like?

But here’s where the magic comes in: They have over four thousand stylists who also not only look at all this information, but continuously improve each box that they send to you by watching what you send back, by conversing with you, and by getting your information.

My girlfriend Mindy was going through breast cancer and she told her stylist, “I need some loose clothes to go through my chemotherapy.” Of course she got a box of comfy, loose clothes, but she also got a bouquet with a personal note.

Here’s what’s interesting: Many organizations get customer growth through recommendations. Netflix grows through its word of mouth. Amazon, about 30% of what they sell comes from recommendations. Where other companies don’t know your life, it is how and why these brands grow.

So do your customers feel that you know them? That you really know them?

Because what’s the first thing you say to a company when they keep asking you to give your information back? “Don’t you know how much I’m worth to you?”

[For more on this topic, be sure to watch my previous episode of “Daily Dose…of Reality”, by clicking here.]

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In this episode, I chat with Bob Thomas, the first chief experience officer at The YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities, about establishing a scalable CX initiative at a nationwide non-profit. Many of you may be familiar with The YMCA (the Y), either from your own experiences at the center or because of the iconic song that many of us have danced to at parties. This legendary organization is a leading nonprofit for youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility.

Bob and I discuss his role and the work that he had to do as a CX leader stepping into a position without a CX team in place. He shares that the Y did a good job communicating he would be in a strong mission-focused role, which was something that was very important to him. We talk about some of the strategic approaches that he and his team took to improve the organization’s culture, and employee and customer experience.

Understand the Environment You’re Trying to Improve

Bob explains that when he first took on the role, he knew that he needed to understand how employees show up for customers, day in and day out. He went to numerous Y branches and spent half a day in uniform, checking people in at the front desk, walking around the pool deck with the lifeguard, and getting a feel for the employee experience on the ground. He wanted to know what interactions with customers were like and what were potential operational challenges.

On the backend, Bob spent time figuring out how to improve marketing and digital aspects of the work, noting that the CRM system was inefficient and created communication difficulties. He and his team invested in a new CRM. The new CRM helped stabilize the foundation of their digital experience, which was extremely important to the check-in and buying experience.

Bob shares that after fixing the CRM, they started making major investments in digital. He wanted to ensure the digital experience would help frame and organize what’s being delivered to the customer on the ground. With help from a CX expert, Bob and his team created customer journey maps that allowed them to make significant changes.

These changes included improving the welcome e-mail with important information to remind members of what they need when they show up, free classes they can take, available services, and more. All of the things to help maximize the experience.

Build Bridges to Connect With Your Team

Bob credits his Chief Operating Officer for helping with the success of the Y’s transformation. The COO had a vision and belief in what the COO’s role was and saw that some of Bob’s actions as CXO crossed over into boundaries that didn’t belong. In order to differentiate and clarify the work, they spent time together figuring out what responsibilities was best for each position.

In addition to building bridges with other leaders, Bob wanted to change the internal culture at the Y to further improve the employee experience. He explains how he set his sights on establishing an internal culture at the Y that would reflect what they wanted their customer experience to be like. Since fun is something the customers expect when they walk into a Y facility, there should be more fun infused within the culture of the organization. Bob was concerned that leaders were taking themselves too seriously, and wanted to loosen things up in the office a bit.

In an effort to infuse more fun into their meetings and hallway conversations, Bob shares that he started incorporating team builder games to foster engagement. For instance, he shares one game in which he asked his colleagues to take a picture of the inside of their refrigerator and send it to him. He would display the images asking his colleagues to guess who’s refrigerator was whose. It’s these games and interactions that help colleagues share more laughs and eases a bit of tension that may come with some of the work.

What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew Then?

Bob says:

Be patient. It’s okay to slow down and go a hundred feet sideways to get six inches forward because if you don’t have the right alignment with the people that you need, no pushing forward is going to be enough to get you there. So patience is probably the biggest part, and the people side of change management is so critical. If you haven’t taken a change management course, it should be fundamentally a huge part of your curriculum coming into a role like this.

About Bob Thomas

At the YMCA, Bob is responsible for engaging community members to help them meet their personal goals, while ensuring a great Y experience through marketing, membership, and healthy living programs.

Prior to joining the Y, Bob held marketing, sales and sales operations leadership positions at Boston Scientific. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and English from the University of St. Thomas.

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In my Daily Dose video series, I explore the topics that chief customer officers must grapple with on a daily basis. Join me as I discuss what I’ve learned over the course of my 35-year career, so that you can more effectively do the work that needs to be done.

For the Chicago Cubs organization, trust and hope—for many, many years—were all the currency they had to give their fans. When they finally won that championship title in 2016, it had been 108 years since a Cubs jersey was in a World Series. Since 1906, the Cubbies had only qualified for the postseason on 18 occasions. Bound together by heartbreak and joy, through generations of families, the Cubs’ relationship with their fans is one of reciprocal trust. Both gave and got.

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Loving the underdog Cubs was a family tradition nurtured by my dad. We made many memories within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. And when that championship title finally came in 2016, my family—as well as millions of other Cubs fans around the world—were rewarded for trusting that their team would eventually win. What’s more, Cubs fans rewarded their team back in kind. Millions came out to cheer them on in a celebration that, by some estimates, is one of the top 10 gatherings in human history. Officials estimate that 5 million people showed up to the parade and rally held for the Cubs in Chicago, making it the seventh largest gathering in human history.

The foundational trust that the Cubs built with their fans is not unlike the trust that grows over time between a company and its customers. While companies may not have millions of people lining the streets to cheer them on, what they end up with is earning essentially the same: a two-way, balanced relationship.

Give Trust to Get Trust

So the goal here is to earn customer trust by trusting them first. Every customer relationship begins because a customer chooses to trust an organization and its people. Physicians are trusted with the health of families. Realtors are trusted to guide a home purchase or sale. Computer manufacturers are trusted to provide reliable equipment to do a job. Banks are trusted to ensure financial safety and security.

Would you invite your mom over to help make dinner, and then chain the blender to the counter? Of course you wouldn’t. But customers can feel at times a lack of trust from companies by how offers are structured, legal wording, and the amount of fine print, or conditions for making a sale. One-sided trust can show up in the manner in which you review new customers you’re considering, or in the contracts customers sign, or requiring compliance to processes that seem to weigh a little heavy on benefiting the company.

This behavior inadvertently makes the customer feel small, and at times defenseless. You know it in your life as a customer. It’s exhausting physically because of the extra time, and the effort required to make sure you get a fair shake, and it’s emotionally exhausting.

This is our opportunity to earn that trust through giving trust. Do you deliberately trust customers back for their trust in you? Do you trust them in your forms, in your paperwork, and in your contracts? Are there any clues that you give them that could indicate a lack of trust, like a pen chained to the desk? Do you have moments where mom might think, “They don’t seem to trust me.”

Inventory Your Opportunities to Give Trust

To move closer to a balanced relationship with your customers, consider inventorying your opportunities for giving trust. Identify communication and compliance to processes required across your customer’s journey. Identify who holds the power in each and why. Then begin to challenge the status quo, and ask the questions your mom would ask.

Ask the questions you know to ask. Overturn and redesign for two-way trust.

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How does a global consumer brand create value for its customers, consumers, and employees? In today’s episode, we talk to Chester Twigg, the first global chief customer officer at Johnson & Johnson.Chester shares that he was approached for the role because there was an internal recognition that it was a position that could truly add value to the business and the organization, to drive a more global consistency around selling.

There’s a lot of great strategic advice in here for those of you who are improving CX in the consumer goods sector, so I encourage you to listen to the full episode!

Create Value for All of Your Constituents

When Chester stepped into the role, he shares that he knew he wanted to focus on providing more value with their three constituents: the customer (retail partner), the consumer (the shopper), and the company.He knew that he had to think through the following: how do you create the best selling team? How do you ensure that there are consistent systems and processes in place to help them deliver their best every day?

To execute their business objective of providing value, Chester and his team picked 5 areas that were relevant to them. They develop strategies for improvement around these 5 areas under an acronym: RACES, as in “off to the races” to help them remember.

A:Accelerate in winning channels. With the understanding that business is shifting heavily into E-commerce, they asked themselves how they could win in this category.

C:Customer team reinvention. Since most of J&J’s business is with big retailers, they have to figure out how to best do business together. How can they create optimal joint business planning?

E:Emerging market excellence. Growth is happening more in emerging markets than in developing markets so how can they reach customers in these new areas?

S: Shopper refocus. Rethink how to work with marketing, R&D, and the supply chain to ensure their products show up well both online and on the shelf.

Chester explains that it was relatively easy for the team to align on these strategies and that some strategies have been tabled for a RACES 2.0 to tackle at a later time.

Keep Employees Engaged and Informed

Internal social networking

At Johnson & Johnson, there are over 4,000 salespeople. To keep the salespeople engaged, Chester and his team have instituted quarterly meetings for updates on the business, priorities, and strategies. There’s also an opportunity to answer questions which can be asked anonymously, which helps leadership stay on the pulse of what’s going on and what people are worried about.

Chester also shares that J&J has a designated social media site called Yammer, where employees can post updates and engage with each other. Chester posts regularly, especially when he’s with customers or key individuals so people know what’s going on. He also updates employees through his blog, Chester’s Chatter which he and the leadership team contribute to each month.

Rethink Training and Hiring Practices

Additionally, Chester and his team spent time improving training within the organization for salespeople. Recognizing that the younger generation of salespeople learns differently, they removed the outdated five-day, intensive “this is how we sell” program. Chester explains that training is now done in bite-sized, Internet-based sessions. This is their way of providing value to employees; giving them access to something when they need it, as they need it.

When it comes to improving the employee experience, Chester also says that at Johnson & Johnson they worked more closely with HR to improve hiring and recruiting strategies. They provided more clarity on capabilities they were looking for regarding salespeople, and also sought to increase diversity.

According to Chester, it’s best to work with HR to get their buy-in for new recruitment strategies by explaining how hiring practices connect back to the purpose of the work, it helps the process move along more smoothly.

What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew Then?

Chester says:

“I think a better understanding of my organization and the style, which is always hard when you come in, would have helped me to build capabilities and conference even faster. I mean one of the advantages I had in my previous company having worked there for a long, long time was that I knew the people. Either they had worked for you before or you had peripheral experience. And so one of the challenges was understanding how to best apply situational leadership because I’m a big believer that people should be led through situational leadership.”

About Chester Twigg

Chester joined Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. from Procter & Gamble, where he spent over 25 years in various roles across the world including the US, China, India, Singapore and Europe. At Johnson & Johnson, Chester plays an important role in the execution of the company’s global consumer strategy, developing new ways of selling to maximize growth and value creation within the sales organization.

Chester holds an MBA (Marketing) and a B.COM. (Commerce and Economics) from the University of Mumbai, India. Chester is based in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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